“Goodbye JEE”

And most of all, peo­ple might start ques­tion­ing more seri­ously which col­lege they want to be at. The IITs seem to be becom­ing more gen­eral too. I’ve heard of some intro­duc­tion of some biol­ogy degrees at some IITs. I think a col­lege ought to be gen­eral. And very loose about what they want the stu­dents to do. And there should exist no 300 stu­dent classes at any point of time, because they serve almost no pur­pose at all.

This will be of interest to my Indian readers in high school / university. I really liked Vishesh’s blog post “Goodbye JEE“. For a long time, I have rationalised, argued, and ranted with spittle flecks leaping out of my mouth about what’s wrong with the Indian higher education system. I’m glad there are still people fighting in that corner. On that note, also read Espera’s “Stupid TAs Annoy Me“. Me, I am done with trying to convince people, partly because I realised that a large part of understanding what’s wrong comes only through self-realisation. Epiphanies that you have through self-realisation have a far more powerful effect. I’d rather just smoke and pass the joint saying “It’s cool, bro”; I don’t feel the urge to make people drink my Kool Aid any more.

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Even when I was in Singapore, I felt an overwhelming bad influence of all that I feel is bad about the education system is in India. Don’t get me wrong, Singapore is doing so many things right – yet it’s getting so many things wrong too. I had this really awesome Canadian expat lecturer in software engineering who’s one of the few fighting to make learning more worthwhile and meaningful. You know what happened to him? He got brutally hacked in the student feedback. A different professor (also in Singapore) also once confided to me that a lot of them don’t want to challenge their students too hard in classes because their pay bonuses are linked to student feedback. Theoretically that’s a nice idea but what happens is that any professor or lecturer who really wants to push boundaries and challenge the class to do more get poor feedback from students across Asia (India, China, Vietnam…) who have been really used to one way of thinking / learning. The few professors who care and the new president of the university though really need to be commended for trying to shake up the system.

In case you’ve smoked more than 10 fags and want to quit, have a look at your lung’s MRI scan. And if you do that, don’t get shocked by those black spots, they’re just a bunch of dead, burnt lung tissue. :-)

If you decide to quit smoking, just in case you don’t want to die of small cell carcinoma at age 55, you’ll have to replace it with something equally stress-relieving (assuming that’s what you smoke for; like most smokers), I’d suggest running. Just get outta house, scream ”FFUUUCCKKK YEAAAHHHH!” and run as fast as you can. Run until you fall down out of sheer exhaustion. Runner’s high is as good at breaking stress and melting away tension as smoking (although I don’t know how smoking does that; smokers I’ve talked to say so. :p)

And lastly, don’t take it as an interference in your personal life. I just want you to live twenty years more that you would with this pathetic habit, so that you can write ten more novels than you would (if that’s what you’d like to do.).

I have a question that needs to be answered as soon as possible: What is the difference (pattern, difficulty level) between the question papers of CBSE Delhi, All India and ‘Foreign’? And (this one is optional) why are the papers different for these regions?

CBSE releases a set of three sample papers for each subject, doesn’t specify it with anything – ”meant for ‘Foreign’ students” – along those lines. If you are from outside Delhi (”All India”), you can compare the difficulty level of the sample (OMAIGAWD!) with yesterday’s physics paper (very easy). Don’t know why they have three different papers, though.

Difficult or not, CBSE exams are nowhere in ‘difficulty level’ when compared to the examinations of state boards in Bihar and UP (haven’t been a student but have attempted their papers – a huge majority of questions in their science and mathematics papers are taken from competitive exams such as the IIT-JEE!).

a) Yes, UK degrees are acceptable in India. Bear in mind India does too have degrees that are three-years long.
b) Even though UK courses are three-years, the number of contact hours is the same as a four year degree in other countries.
c) In addition to that, the one-year long internship that I do as part of my degree makes it four-years long.